TIBCO Simplifies Integration Lifecycle Management
If you are a part of an enterprise integration center of excellence (COE), you know that integration apps are built through a continuous process of development, testing, and deployment, as seen in figure 1. This is called the “integration lifecycle”, and it’s supported by teams of people conducting various activities that support the lifecycle, hence Integration Lifecycle Management. But without the right tools to support the integration lifecycle, managing it requires extra effort from the integration team, and increases the risk of poor quality integrations.
Figure 1: The Integration Lifecycle
That’s why in the June release of TIBCO Cloud Integration, we’ve introduced new features that help you simplify Integration Lifecycle Management. Our goal was to give you more flexibility so that you can configure TIBCO Cloud Integration to support your lifecycle management needs.
To start, we have introduced “child organizations” to TIBCO Cloud Integration, which provide a logical separation between the teams that deploy integration applications. Instead of using Sandboxes for each phase of the integration lifecycle—you can have completely separate child organizations for each phase.
You can also use child organizations to mirror your organizational hierarchy. For example, you could deploy all of your finance and operations integration apps in one child organization, and deploy integration apps for your marketing team into a separate child organization. Regardless of how you choose to organize them, child organizations allow you to define separate user access to the applications within them, improving the discipline and control over your entire integration process.
We’ve also added new roles to TIBCO Cloud Integration—Admin, User, and Read-Only. These are assigned at the organization level (child or parent) so you can have very fine-grained control over who has access in each organization, and what they can do. Roles allow you to get more team members involved in integrations while maintaining discipline and control over the process.
We are also introducing Application Ownership, which gives control to the developer who is working on an integration application. Other team members can see what the developer is working on or how they might have designed an application, but they can’t make updates unless they are given ownership rights. We’ll be investigating the expansion of this collaboration model as time goes on, but this is a great start.
Finally, we’ve updated the application operations within TIBCO Cloud Integration too, including the ability to copy an application from one child organization to another, if the user is a member of both organizations. We’ve also brought endpoint visibility down to the application level. As you can call into your applications via REST APIs, for example, you have the ability to designate the visibility of these endpoints as either Public (available across the internet) or Private (available onto to other TIBCO Cloud apps such as TIBCO Cloud Mashery and TIBCO LiveApps). With sandboxes, you specified this visibility at the sandbox level, and it propagated to all applications within the sandbox. Now, you can set specific visibility for each application individually – providing you with more fine-grained control over access to your applications.
Integration Lifecycle Management is different between each organization, and your approach will be unique to yours. The new features we’ve introduced within TIBCO Cloud Integration bring flexibility to the integration process so that it supports whatever approach is right for you. And they make it easy for your team members to collaborate across your process. These features are now immediately available to your organization.
TIBCO Cloud Integration is setting the foundation for innovation, and preparing for more valuable features to deliver to you in the near future!
To see what TIBCO Cloud Integration can do for your organization, request a free trial today.